Rice, shopping for shoes and dining in NYC the day after hurricane struck
Seperated at birth: Imelda Marcos, another shoe queen
New Orleans: United States of Shame – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News — This op-ed actually ran in the New York Times and got picked up worldwide. I sense that we’ll be reading a lot of these scathing critiques in the weeks ahead. This will be followed by grisley news reports then a congressional investigation that will go nowhere. In-between there will be a lot of self-congratulatory and official press conferences that will tell the public what a great job everyone did. It will then be forgotten after a few prayer meetings.
Of course the following and most scathing commentary within this column (below) was buried at the end of the article instead of being put at the top where it belongs. Here is what shoud be the lead paragraphs.
Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA – a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association – admitted he didn’t know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.
Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle – Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo’s on Fifth Avenue and attended “Spamalot” before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine – lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.
Of course that won’t happen. But the 2006 Congressional elections just got more interesting.
